John Edwards: I'm Not a Crook (Just a Jerk)!

If you knock up Rielle Hunter (and make a sex tape) while your wife's terminally ill, then use her cancer to win sympathy from voters while seeking your party's nomination for President of the United States, you are a pretty bad person.

Still, John Edwards says, he didn't do anything illegal.

With daughter Cate Edwards standing behind him, he pleaded not guilty to using campaign money to cover up his affair and love child with Hunter.

"There is no question that I’ve done wrong," the two-time former presidential hopeful said outside the federal courthouse in Winston-Salem, N.C.

"I take full responsibility for having done wrong. I will regret for the rest of my life the pain and the harm that I’ve caused to others. But I did not break the law, and I never, ever thought I was breaking the law."

A federal grand jury indicted John Edwards for breaking federal campaign finance laws while he was running for president back in 2008.

In 2007, the National Enquirer first got wind of - and reported - John's affair with Rielle. He denied it all profusely and that was that.

After the 2008 primaries, the Enquirer busted him visiting Rielle. He confessed the affair, but still maintained the child was not his.

More than a year later, with Andrew Young set to blow the whistle on his role in the ordeal, he finally admitted paternity as well.

Prosecutors allege funds were paid to Rielle Hunter and onetime Edwards aide Young - who for a long time claimed he knocked up Rielle - to cover up Edwards' affair with Hunter and the child they had together.

Prosecutors claim the money came from political donors and can be considered campaign funds since they aided Edwards' presidential bid.

I am and have been willing to take any test necessary to establish the fact that I am not the father of any baby, and I am truly hopeful that a test will be done so this fact can be definitively established.